Out of My Depth (17 page)

‘We moved in together as soon as we found a place.’ She looked at Tamsin. ‘You remember how I was always imagining the man I would marry. Some Mr Darcy type. Well, Martin was him. A ginger version of him, anyway. I used to draw pictures of myself in my wedding dress, at school. Suddenly, I was doing it again. I practised writing my married name — Isabelle Allington — even though on principle I wanted to keep my own name. I wanted to give myself to Martin completely, because that was what he wanted. I started to think we were great lovers. I tried so hard to make it a union of souls that I convinced myself in the end.

‘When we moved in together, I came down to earth a bit. He could be moody, but I knew he was moodier with other people than he ever was with me. I tried not to take it personally.’ Izzy was speaking through gritted teeth. ‘When Caitlin came to stay, he’d hand her to me to deal with, and she was so tiny, and I hardly knew how to handle her. Then he proposed. A great, romantic proposal in Paris. We were up the Eiffel Tower. There was a strong wind blowing and I couldn’t hear him at first, but I kind of got the message from the fact that he was kneeling in front of me with a ring in a box. Everyone else noticed, too, and there was quite a crowd around us. Oh, I was the most glamorous, luckiest, happiest girl in the world, believe me. They all looked at me, and Martin was gazing with his big dark eyes, and I had to shout “Yes!” so he’d hear me above the wind. Then I looked at everyone around us and shouted, “Oui!" even though they must all have known the meaning of the word “yes”. And they all clapped. And we held hands and looked down at Paris and Martin put the ring on my finger.’

She sighed, wishing she could leave it there, at the high point of the story. ‘I got my white wedding. Most of you were there. And then things changed. I know things are bound to change once you’re married. I was on cloud nine for the first couple of months. Always cooking for Martin and somehow actually taking pleasure in ironing his shirts and all that crap, and he was still sending me flowers at work when I wasn’t expecting them. But my feet touched the ground, and Martin took me off the pedestal rather quickly, and it started to go a bit weird. He got moodier and moodier. I felt I couldn’t do anything right. If I cooked, he was mad because he’d wanted to go out. If I didn’t cook, he wanted to know why not. If he wanted to watch something on telly, I’d have to remain absolutely silent throughout. The worst, though, was the jealousy. I’d always gone out after work at least once a week. I met up with uni friends who were in London, or went out with colleagues. It was good fun, and I don’t need to tell you, as you are all sane and rational people, that it was normal and innocent. First of all Martin started asking about my friends. I was the only one who was married and that upset him. But I was twenty-five, which made the fact that I was married quite a curiosity. Of course my friends were single. He thought it was “inappropriate” for me to hang out with single girls, because of course they were all out to lead me astray. Then he started quizzing me about whether there’d been any men with us. Well, of course there had. I worked with men. My friends had boyfriends. I did, amazingly, have some male friends.

‘That was incomprehensible. He would shout at me and accuse me of horrible things, things I would just never dream of doing. He once said that he knew I’d had sex with some bloke called Paul, on some bins behind a Turkish restaurant in Seven Sisters. He said he’d seen me. He’d shout and scream for hours. Then he’d be all right, and he’d hug me and apologise and stroke my hair, and he’d whisper that it was just because he adored me. He couldn’t believe that every other man in the world didn’t love me and want me as much as he did.

‘So things started getting bad, and they stayed that way for a couple of years. I started wanting to leave. On my twenty-eighth birthday, I made the decision. I was resolute. I packed a suitcase, and when he came home, I opened my mouth to tell him I was leaving. However. He thought all my nervousness was leading up to something else. He was in a good mood and he started laughing. “I know what you’re trying to ask,” he said, and he touched my nose like that.’ Izzy demonstrated. ‘Being all cute.’

“‘No you don’t,” I told him.

“‘I do,” he assured me. “You think it’s time for a baby. And guess what? I agree!”

‘And somehow, the thought of a baby hit me right in the stomach. I hadn’t felt broody until that moment. But when he said it, I desperately wanted one. I told myself it would be different with a baby. Everything would be fine. I knew it wouldn’t, really, particularly since his previous relationship had ended three months after Caitlin was born. But I convinced myself because I wanted it to be true. I rushed upstairs and unpacked my bag, and all the time I did it I was praying that he wouldn’t come into the bedroom and ask what I was doing. And I got pregnant straightaway, first month, before I could see sense.’

Izzy paused. She was nearly there. Tamsin touched her arm, gently urging her on.

‘So Sam was born,’ she said, swallowing. ‘Motherhood was overwhelming. Wonderful, but so different from what I had expected. It took me ages to get used to it. I was so focused on Sam that I didn’t really notice that Martin was barely about. I preferred it when he was out. He used to swear at Sam crying in the night. It was much easier for me to do it all myself.

‘Then, on Sam’s first birthday, he told me who he’d been out with all those evenings. Somebody called Jennifer, who was seventeen. They were, apparently, in love. It was, apparently, my fault for putting on weight when I had the baby and for having my hair cut. Which I did because I didn’t have the time to wash and dry it, as a working mother. He packed up and left, and Sam and I moved back to Cardiff.’

Susie leaned forward. ‘He’s not still seeing the teenager?’

Izzy nodded. ‘She’s probably twenty by now. But yes. I think that’s the way he works, and I cannot tell you how it feels to pack my little boy off to stay with them, knowing that Martin’s handing him over to Jennifer for the weekend. But at least Sam sees Caitlin at his dad’s. She’s twelve and she’s lovely. I’m even quite friendly with her mum these days. I suppose that Martin’s picked a young one this time so he’ll have a few years before the inevitable happens. I hate him more than I can possibly say.’ Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact. ‘I hope he rots in hell for eternity. I almost believe in hell, specially for Martin. He’s a bully and a pig and because I’ve got Sam I can’t even wish I’d never met him, and because I’ve got Sam I have to keep in touch with him for ever and ever. I have to take him on the train to Swindon every other weekend to hand him over.’ She sighed. ‘But I’m getting back on track now. I mean, it’s been over two years since he left us. We’re still not quite divorced. As you can see, he picked me up as a pretty little girl and left me as a fat mother.’ She laughed. And I do mean mother. I don’t mean “mother” in the abbreviated sense. I haven’t got the time or the money, or the inclination really, to sort my appearance. I’d rather spend my money on a Buzz Lightyear suit than a Chanel suit. I think Martin only likes pretty little girls who do what he wants, and I imagine he’s destined to repeat the cycle for the rest of his life, and I feel stupid for getting caught up in it. I resisted him for ages. I should have stuck with my instincts.’ Nobody said anything. ‘So there you are,’ Izzy said, wanting to stress that her story was over. ‘That’s me.’

Amanda spoke first. ‘Bloody hell, what a fucking bastard!’ she said.

Izzy shrugged. ‘It was crap but I’m still here. Could have been worse.’

Tamsin squeezed Izzy’s knee under the table. ‘You’ve done brilliantly,’ she said quietly. ‘I wish I’d been around to give you moral support. How has it been, back in Cardiff?’

Izzy swallowed. ‘Not too bad. My job’s much more boring than the one in London, but I’m glad to be out of the city. Always going to be weird, I think, going back to your origins. I pass Lodwell’s on the bus from time to time and I see the girls going in and out, all innocent looking.’

Susie laughed. ‘Not that innocent, if I recall correctly.’

‘Well, I pass the girls and I’d really rather not see the school, even by accident. Oh, and did you know, they have bloody boys there these days! In the sixth form!’

‘No!’ chorused Susie, Amanda and Tamsin.

‘Christ,’ muttered Amanda. ‘How much time would that have saved? Kids these days don’t know they’re born.’

‘I know. I think that every time I see them,’ said Izzy. ‘Skinny little blokes with the smuggest faces you’ve seen in your life. Girls on all sides. But I hate being there. I hate feeling that I haven’t moved on from it. But I’ve got my folks reasonably nearby, still in Dinas, and they’re great. Sam loves seeing so much of them. And I have friends, and I have a job, and I just about support us both and pay for occasional treats like this trip, for instance. But it’s not what I ever wanted for myself. It’s . . .’ She screwed up her face and tried to pinpoint what it was. ‘Humdrum! That’s what it is. It’s a humdrum life. I go to work and try to drum up an interest in various trade publications. Enough interest to get me through the editing day, anyway. Sam goes to nursery. I pick him up on the way home. We watch telly. We eat. We read books. We do it all again the next day. I mean, there you are, Amanda, with your exciting London life, and your house and your cars and your gym and the children going to ballet and judo all the time. And Susie, you’ve got all this, you’ve got absolutely everything. Tamsin’s been living by the beach in Sydney for all these years, which is so amazing I can barely imagine it. All of you have made spectacularly wonderful lives for yourselves. And there I am, five miles from where I grew up, feeling a sense of achievement if I get to work before nine thirty.’ She stopped. She didn’t want her emotions to get the better of her. ‘I’d like to change it,’ she said, in a measured voice. ‘But I cannot for the life of me imagine how.’

‘Get a boyfriend,’ Patrick suggested.

Izzy laughed, annoyed. ‘Oh, silly me! Single mother, on the wrong side of thirty, and also on the wrong side of size fourteen, seeks perfect man. They’re beating the door down.’

‘You’ve got everything going for you,’ Tamsin told her. ‘I mean it. It’ll happen, and it’ll be someone far more worthy than that tosser you married.’

The others nodded. Izzy felt sure they were just being polite.

‘Anyway,’ she said, with a wave of her hand. ‘Susie, it’s your turn.’

I hesitated. The main course was ready, and Roman hadn’t come back from answering the phone. Nobody else seemed to notice: they had all been absorbed in poor Izzy’s woes. I wanted to find him. He was being rude and he shouldn’t have stayed on the phone for so long. It was probably his mother, anyway I ought to extract him from the receiver, get the starters cleared away, serve the chicken, and then launch into my tale. Except that I thought I might like Roman out of the way while I spoke; purely for presentational purposes.

‘OK,’ I said, smiling. ‘But I’ll just turn the oven off. I’ll be quick and then we can get the main course out before Tamsin’s turn.’ I skipped to the kitchen and made sure everything was all right (I already knew it was). Back in my seat, I tried to decide where to begin. I had practised this monologue for months but, inevitably, my mind was blank.

‘Well. I left school after A levels,’ I began, echoing the others. ‘I didn’t really know what I was going to do. We were all knocked for six, really, weren’t we? You were, of course, Tamsin, but the rest of us were too, in a much more minor way I felt terrible about what happened.’ I felt Amanda’s eyes on me. I knew she was panicking. I met her eyes and smiled an infinitesimal, reassuring smile. Not tonight. ‘And I was desperately worried about you, Tamsin. We had no idea what you were up to, and whether you were all right. Anyway, I could have gone to Manchester University, but I turned it down and moved to London. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had no ambitions. I just wanted to do something different, and I had always thought of London as my home. I had a rather rosy view of it, like you do if you leave somewhere when you’re young. So I got there, and started wait-ressing. I lived in a squat. Actually, there were several of them. I still had spiky hair and a fat arse and spots. After a while, I got a boyfriend. He was at art school, and that seemed cool, so I applied too, to the same place, and I did a foundation course and kept up my waitressing in the evenings. It was all a bit hand-to-mouth.’

I swallowed. I considered glossing over this period of my life entirely, but I knew I had to sketch it out, elide it.

‘I drifted by, really,’ I said. ‘Like I said, I had no ambition. Or rather, I was ambitious, but it was unfocused. I wanted a different life, but I couldn’t be bothered to work out how to get one, and in a way I didn’t think I deserved one. I was one step up from a down-and-out, and I think it was art school that saved me from that. It was full of misfits, and if I’d been a bit wackier I would almost have blended in. I made funny bits of conceptual art, but my heart wasn’t in it, and I started to find I preferred still life and figurative stuff. That wasn’t something to shout about: it was very uncool.’

I paused, and edited out the most important thing that had ever happened to me; the defining event of my life.

‘It was one of my tutors at art school who changed my life,’ I was picking up the story later on. ‘She used to help me because she said I was good at still life and life drawing. Her name was Janet. She was one of those art school women who drift around in purple clothes and keep their hair much too long and straggly. Now, no one else was interested in figurative stuff. They all learned to draw because you had to, but then they were off, doing wacky installations, you know the kind of thing. Britart, as it wasn’t yet called. But I was never interested in blood sculpture or sticking dog turds on photos of Thatcher. And Janet was the only one who made me feel that that was OK. She sat down with me one afternoon in the studio and made me think about my life.’